minded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it: 'Excellent talker, very-if you let him start from no premises and 'come to no conclusion.' The meaning singsong of that theosophic-metaphysical monotony left on you at last a very dreary feeling.".

Not a few of us gladly acknowledge that they owe much to Coleridge; but those who owe him most must, we think, accept as essentially just Carlyle's estimate of the intellectual and moral nature of the man :

THE CHARACTER OF COLERIDGE,

"To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment. A subtle lynxeyed intellect, tremulous pious sensibility to all good and all beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light;-but imbedded in such weak laxity of character, in such indolences and esuriences as had made strange work with it. Once more the tragic story of a high endowment, with an insufficient will. An eye to discern the divineness of the Heaven's splendors and lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their godlike radiances and brilliances; but no heart to front the scathing terrors of them, which is the first condition of your conquering an abiding-place there.

"The courage necessary for him, above all things, had been denied this man. His life, with such ray of the empyrean in it, was great and terrible to him; and he had not valiantly grappled with it, he had fled from it; sought refuge in vague day-dreams, hollow compromises, in opium, in theosophic metaphysics. Harsh pain, danger, necessity, slavish harnessed toil, were of

all things abhorrent to him. And so the empyrean element, lying smothered under the terrene, and yet inextinguishable there, made sad writhings. For pain, danger, difficulty, steady slaving toil, and other highly disagreeable behests of destiny, shall in no wise be shirked by any the brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this world; nay, precisely the higher he is, the deeper will be the disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on him; and the heavier too, and more tragic, his penalties if he neglect them.”

DURING the five years following the publication of his "Cromwell," Carlyle wrote little. In the mean while, what seemed likely to be the era of universal overthrow had begun with the "revolutionary year," 1848. It seemed as though all the state clothes of Christendom had fallen to tatters, and were about to be contemptuously flung into the rag-basket or upon the dung-hill. In February, 1850, Carlyle put forth the first of his "Latter-Day Pamphlets," which were continued monthly until August. A few weeks before he had put forth a magazine paper on "The Nigger Question," which was afterward published

separately, and styled by him "the precursor to Latter-Day Pamphlets." Strictly speaking, it should be considered a sequel to them, as it attempts to point out a practical solution, although upon a small scale, of the problem mooted in them. At the opening of the first of the "Latter-Day Pamphlets," entitled "The Present Time," Carlyle raises his doleful jeremiad :

EVIL DAYS.

"Few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days, days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded; if they are not days of endless hope, too, then are they days of endless despair. There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all. That human beings in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there: this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final."

The following is essentially Carlyle's own "Summary" of this pamphlet on "The Present Time," we only omitting a portion of the topics, and introducing a few words to connect the sentences:

EUROPE IN 1850.

"There is now a would-be reforming Pope, and a huge unreformable Popedom. The European explosion is boundless and uncontrollable; all kings are conscious that they are but play-actors. In France there is a wel

tering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, the first stump-orator of the world, standing for a time on the highest stump.Democracy is an inevitable fact of the days we live in. But mere democracy for ever is impossible, since the universe itself is a monarchy, a hierarchy, and it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise. There is a new sacrament of divorce called 'emancipation' and 'enfranchisement,' as of the West Indian blacks and Irish whites; but the fate of emancipated helplessness is sooner or later tragically inevitable. British industrial existence is fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence. British liberty is only constituted anarchy. England never needed kings as much as now; but the new commander or king is not discoverable by popular clamor or by universal suffrage. The few wise men will have to take and keep command of the innumerable foolish."

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He goes on to affirm that the organization of industry can not be brought about "by isolated men and their vague efforts. Government is everywhere called upon to give the initiative." He imagines the case that there were somehow to be raised "Chief Governor of England worthy of that high name "-call him the Prime Minister, if one pleases-and proposes for him a speech to be delivered to "the floods of Irish and other Beggars, the able-bodied Jack-alls, nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly, out-door and in-door, of the Pauper Populations of these Realms." Of this proposed speech we quote, with curtailments, some paragraphs :

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

"Vagrant Jack-alls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all! the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you I know not. One thing I have at last discovered: that you can not be left to roam abroad in this misguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal chain upon those who might be able to stand. I at last perceive that all this that has been sung and spoken for a long while about enfranchisement, emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is little other than temporary jargon, made up of sense and nonsense-sense in small quantities and nonsense in very large.

"Self-government is not for emancipated horses, nor for you. Algiers, Brazil, or Dahomey hold nothing in them so authentically slaves as you are. Only as recognized captives, as unfortunate fallen brothers, requiring that I should command you, and if need were control and compel you, can there be henceforth a relation between us. Ask me not for Indian-meal. You shall be compelled to earn it first. Here is work for you. Strike into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience, heartiness, according to the methods here prescribed. Wages follow for you without difficulty, all manner of just remuneration; and at length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it, shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules-I will endeavor to incite you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you, and make God's earth—the forlorn hope in God's battle-free of you."

But how shall this able Chief Governor be found? How shall any people know him if he